Tag: toddler craft

I’ve continued to do our monthly toddler crafts with my local Baby Bootcamp franchise (past projects here) but I have been terrible about blogging and sharing them. But this month’s salt dough ornaments are so cute I just had to share!! I thought it would be fun for each kid to make a keepsake item for their family or to give as a gift this season and decided salt dough ornaments was the perfect idea. Salt dough is easy to make; it’s just a 2 to 1 to 1 ratio of flour to salt to warm water. You mix all the ingredients until a dough is formed and then roll out and cut into shapes as you would cookies. (Official recipe: 2C flour, 1C salt, 1C warm water. Whisk flour and salt. Add water slowly while mixing. Kneed dough for 10 minutes).

You can use cookie cutters or free hand shapes – we shaped letters by rolling the dough into a snake shape and molding into letters. It’s also a cute idea to create a flat ball and get a hand or footprint of your child too. Note – if your end result is an ornament you’ll want to use a straw to make a hole in it at this point too to string and hang later.

Once your shapes are created you want to bake the dough low and slow (low oven temp, long cook time). For this dough that was about 1/8″ thick it was about an hour and a half of baking at 200 degrees. You don’t want to make the oven any hotter or the dough will brown.

Once out of the oven and cooled it’s time to decorate! You can draw with marker or get really into it (as we did here) and use acrylic paint and glue with sparkles. Be creative! These are great as gifts to grandparents but also as a gift tag on a present for someone like a teacher or friend.

Once paint and/or glitter has dried, seal with spray clear acrylic sealer. Salt dough ornaments are the perfect afternoon activity for your toddler or preschooler to keep them busy during these over-excited weeks leading up to Christmas!

For March’s toddler craft for our local Baby Bootcamp Stroller Friends play date the theme was vegetables since a rep from a local farm was coming to teach the kiddos about vegetables and “eating a rainbow,” so I had to think of something veggie-friendly for our craft. Then I thought if you ask any toddler and they will call lettuce “salad,” as if there’s nothing else to salad!

So, I thought it would be fun to cut a bunch of vegetables out of construction paper and have the kids make their own, very colorful construction paper salad. I pre-cut all the veggies (and had the plate in the first photo as a key of sorts for the parents to know what each color/shape was supposed to be) but had the kids tear up the green construction paper to prep their own “lettuce” for the salad. You can have your toddler help cut the veggies if they’re good with scissors.

Everyone’s salads were so colorful and unique! After the craft the farm rep shared some vegetables from the farm and the kids could eat an actual salad, too! A great way to learn about vegetables – I hope you try this one with your kiddos!

For this month’s toddler craft project I had to do something for Valentine’s Day. I thought it would be cute to put together pasta necklaces that the kids can either wear themselves or give to someone they love like, I don’t know – their moms! And to add an extra level of craftiness to this craft I thought it would be cute to paint the pasta in red, pink, and white to make them even more appropriate for Valentine’s Day. Now, we have about a dozen kids at 1 kitchen table doing these craft projects every month so having them paint the beads was not going to happen so I painted them ahead of time. But, if your toddler/child is old enough the first step in this project can be for them to paint the pasta.

For pasta I used ziti, ditalini (the tiny ones), and rigatoni (not pictured).

I used regular craft paint in red, pink, and white.

And painted each bead – you can roll the smooth pasta shapes in the paint but for a noodle like rigatoni you’ll have to paint each one to get in the grooves.

Once dry, string on yarn with a store-bought heart beads and voila – an adorable Valentine’s Day Pasta Necklace for your loved one!

This month’s toddler craft project for our local Baby Bootcamp Stroller Friends play date is quite timely as we’re about to get 2 feet of snow where we live – we’re making snowflakes! These Popsicle stick snowflakes are great because they are simple to prep and then your toddler has free reign over how they’re decorated. It’s also a great way to use up random craft supplies you have – leftover glitter, old stickers, random yarn, etc…

To make the snowflakes you need 4 Popsicle sticks. Use a glue gun to glue one on top of another until your snowflake is made.

Then let your toddler at it with glue stick, glitter, stickers, paint, markers, whatever you have around the house.

Last step, use some string, yarn, (which would look best) or even a pipe cleaner (as Z wanted to use) to tie around the snowflake to proudly hang up in your home!

This month’s toddler craft project for our local Baby Bootcamp Stroller Friends play date (you can see last month’s here) is a really cute, really simple snowman made with marshmallows. If your toddler is anything like mine, holiday decorations are where it’s at right now. This little snowman can be strung and hung on your Christmas tree or simply sat on a shelf to add to your decor.

To make this snowman you will need” 2 marshmallows (I used extra-large ones, because why not?), pipe cleaners, poms poms, a marker/sharpie, and glue.

Glue your marshmallows together end to end. I suggest using your glue gun for this part and do it before your toddler starts the project (toddlers and glue guns don’t seem to mix well). Then add pompoms for the nose and the buttons down the front. Using elmer’s or glue stick is fine for this part. Then draw your eyes on your snowman (I used marker, you could use googly eyes or whatever you want).

Use a black pipe cleaner and take a few strands off the end so you can stick it into the marshmallow to make your snowman’s pipe.

Now add accessories! For this snowman we used a pipe cleaner for a scarf and then twisted a second pompom around my finger and added a pompom on top for a little winter hat.